Friday, June 11, 2010

"Call Me, Barry."

Seems the Flat Earthers were right all this time. The sun is revolving around the earth and this morning it rose in the west and all streams and brooks in the United States are running in the same direction. Pigs are flying (presumably away from the baleful purview of the SEC, EPA and the Interior Ministry) and the oily chickens have come home to roost.

By now, we've heard every variant possible on Sarah Palin's election year mantra of "Drill, Baby, Drill!", some of them sloppily straying into the realm of assonance. We've heard "Shill, Baby, Shill!" and, since the Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 rig workers, "Spill, Baby, Spill!" Now it seems that Sarah Palin has suddenly learned to "Spell, Baby, Spell!"

In her one of her latest Facebook dispatches, Sarah Palin has actually come out in favor of heavy government regulation in the wake of the BP oil spill. Yes, the woman who made "Drill, Baby, Drill!" a Republican mantra, the woman who implied that President Barack Obama was a wealth-redistributing Socialist, is challenging the President to call her so she can give him more than the broad strokes of what actually appears to be a pretty good plan for government regulation of the oil industry.

It's even perfectly spelled, which is a sure sign that it's as ghost-written as her $7 million memoir Going Rogue.

But Sarah Palin, in favor of evil gubmint regulation and willing to work with our Democrat President to this end? Next thing, Rush Limbaugh will suspend his honeymoon to volunteer in an inner city soup kitchen and Ann Coulter will say grace at the dinner table.

But all seeming Republican changes of heart are conditional or aren't what they appear to be. And despite the fact that, starting with the title, "Less Talkin', More Kickin'", there are enough apostrophe-shortened words and hillbillyesque phrases such as, "Or, what the heck, give me a call" to give one the impression that Palin tore herself from her $200,000 a pop rubber chicken circuit to do her civic duty. And why should the President call her?

I learned firsthand the way these companies operate when I served as chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (AOGCC). I ended up resigning in protest because my bosses (the Governor and his chief of staff at the time) wouldn’t support efforts to clean up the corruption involving improper conflicts of interest with energy companies that the state was supposed to be watching. (I wrote about this valuable learning experience in my book, “Going Rogue”.) I felt guilty taking home a big paycheck while being reduced to sitting on my thumbs..

In short, because she has so much experience dealing with oil types since she did such a bang-up job talking to oil executives during her Gubernatorial fling. (This included raising the windfall tax on oil and gas companies, which resulted in a $1200 rebate for every Alaskan which they were then encouraged to put back in the pockets of those same oil companies when the post-tax price of gas and oil shot up.)

So are we seeing Sarah 2.0, a newly rehabilitated progressive armed with ecological righteousness and a Strunk and White in one hand? Er, no.

Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!

Eyes on the prize, Sarah. Eyes on the prize. Never waver from your beloved "Drill, Baby, Drill!" mantra despite oily oceans of evidence conclusively proving with every dead fish and every mutilated body of an innocent Arab in the Persian Gulf that the oil industry is trashing our sea, land and water and is in itself a political force that provides a ready-made reason to invade one oil-rich country after another.

And lest we remain heartened by Sarah Barracuda's refreshingly progressive stance on regulation, let's not overlook this one telling passage:

The current debate over financial reform demonstrates what happens when political leaders react to a crisis with a raft of new regulations.

Ah, there we have it. Let's not really regulate but to rattle our sabers and gas nozzles at them just long enough to let them know we're feigning seriousness about regulation. Let's just not go overboard about it.

So why shouldn't the President call America's most beloved grifter, someone who took fat paychecks while chairing the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission then (I'll presume) guiltily accepted another fat paycheck from Regnery Press for a book she didn't even write then (even more guiltily, let's presume in the interests of fairness) stole land that didn't belong to her so she could bankrupt Wasilla over her glorified hockey rink?

Why not call Alaska's ex Governor? As the old saying goes, "Set a thief to catch a thief."